Parking – Gigaomhttp://gigaom.com
The industry leader in emerging technology researchMon, 19 Mar 2018 22:01:45 +0000en-UShourly1The driverless economy: what our city streets might be like in 2020http://gigaom.com/2016/04/15/the-driverless-economy-what-our-city-streets-might-be-like-in-2020/
http://gigaom.com/2016/04/15/the-driverless-economy-what-our-city-streets-might-be-like-in-2020/#commentsFri, 15 Apr 2016 13:58:15 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=949985Paradoxically, here in early 2016, we are witnessing the lowest U.S. gas prices in years, but we are also moving toward a transportation era based on dramatically different economic premises, most obviously driverless vehicles. So it seems a perfect time to dig into the deep economics of cars, their impacts on city life, and what we can anticipate coming down the pike with the rise of driverless vehicles and smarter ways of living in cities once we can depend on AI-augmented transport.

Perhaps there is nothing so pedestrian as parking, a global phenomenon that we generally take for granted along with many of the other externalized costs associated with car culture. The hard fact is that the typical car spends 95 percent of its working life parked. This means that little of the value of the car is actually realized. And, according to the AAA, the average cost of owning and maintaining a mid-sized car in the U.S. in 2014 was almost $9,000, of which $1,300 per year goes just to parking! Therefore we should not be surprised that parking is a $100B industry. This despite the fact that as much as 98 percent of car trips — at least in Los Angeles — start or end with free parking, according to the California Household Travel survey.

Parking consumes a great deal of time, and according to Daniel Shoup, 16 studies from 1927 to 2001 found that 30 percent of the cars in congested downtown traffic were cruising to find parking, on average. He also notes that more recently, in 2006 and 2007, 28 percent of the drivers stopped at traffic signals in Manhattan and 45 percent in Brooklyn were searching for curbside parking.The average American takes four car trips a day, and if you figure two are commuting based, that can still translate into a half hour or more of looking for a space.

We seldom think of how much of our cities are given over to cars, but in one study it was found that 14 percent of Los Angeles is devoted to parking. Barclay’s Capital reported that we could see a 60 percent decline in the number of cars on the road, but the impact on parking could be much greater.

Obviously, the emergence of driverless vehicles suggests a great deal about the future of cities, and the impact on parking may be considerable. First of all, it’s clear that the on-demand car services like Uber and Lyft (along with car manufacturers like GM and Ford) have plans to provide driverless transportation to replace ‘drivered’ cars. That means that cars will not be parked after you get to the office, movie theater, or even grocery store.

One study suggested that a single driverless car could replace up to 12 drivered cars. Instead of being parked at some destinations, the driverless car will simply move on to the next pick up. Another consideration is that driverless cars may be folded into municipal transport plans, like trains, buses, ferries, and bicycles, and not managed like taxis or on-demand cars services, at all.

Even for those cars that are privately owned — which is likely to be a much smaller number considering how cheap Uberish services might be once the driver is out of the picture — driverless cars may be much more efficiently parked than human-managed ones, requiring dramatically less parking.

One thing that is bound to change is the way that municipalities require a great deal of parking allocated for new housing, based on historic patterns. That is likely to change very quickly, and will immediately lead to denser and lower cost housing, even before our cityscapes are dramatically remade.

There are other very significant economic impacts that will arise from driverless cars. It’s been estimated that accidents will fall 80 percent in next 20 years as driverless cars sideline human drivers who are demonstrably terrible at driving. As a direct consequence, car insurance will plummet, with a drop from coverage of $125 billion in covered losses in the U.S. today, down to as little as $50 billion in 2040. But this is hard to predict, since we have no prior data. It could be much, much lower.

Source: The University of Texas at Austin

In the simulation above, we can get a sense of the driverless future. The white rectangles represent cars that have been ‘scheduled’ to pass through an intersection,while yellows have yet to be scheduled. But once scheduled, the cars are coordinated in their passage, so that traffic signals are not necessary, and the flow rate of the cars is much, much faster, without the need to stop once scheduled.

The economics of frictionless traffic — without traffic lights, traffic jams, and built-in delays — is another large factor in the net savings from driverless transport. Living and working in the city of 2025 will feel totally different, and not just because there is no driver turning the wheel. It will be a totally foreign landscape, with little parking, no congestion, and much more space at street level dedicated to people, and with significantly fewer cars in view at any time. Driverless won’t mean carless, but cars will no longer dominate our cities as they do today. And I can’t wait.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2016/04/15/the-driverless-economy-what-our-city-streets-might-be-like-in-2020/feed/7On-demand parking war heats up as Luxe’s rival ZIRX comes to LAhttp://gigaom.com/2014/11/24/on-demand-parking-war-heats-up-as-luxes-rival-zirx-comes-to-la/
Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:51:07 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=894084ZIRX, one of the new on-demand parking apps to emerge in the last six months, has just expanded to Los Angeles. It’s following closely on the heels of its competitor Luxe, which announced its LA move last week. The parking wars are heating up.

If you’re the sort to pay attention to developments in the on-demand space, you probably noticed the internet collectively falling in love with Luxe in the last month. The parking app allows you to hand your car off to an attendant anywhere in San Francisco, and have it returned to you where you finish your day. The price — $5/hour and $15 maximum — had reporters from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal swooning over the convenience after trying it.

Quietly in the background, Luxe’s biggest competitor went about its business, as it had since launching in June, months prior. In what could be a significant miscalculation, ZIRX CEO Sean Behr didn’t hire an external PR firm to sing its praises to the press. “We’ve just been really focused on doing rather than talking,” Behr told me on the phone.

As a result, the rather unfortunately named ZIRX (sounds like a Toy Story character) received mentions in the flood of stories about Luxe, halfway down the page, in lists of its competitors. It was portrayed almost as an afterthought, not the market leader.

It’s a weird dissonance, because ZIRX launched earlier and moved into its second market — Seattle — months before Luxe moved into its second market of LA. As a result, it has also built more product features than Luxe.

It’s available on both iOS and Android, while Luxe is just iOS for now. In markets like Seattle, where a larger chunk of the public is on Android, that makes a big difference for customer expansion.

ZIRX, unlike Luxe, offers overnight parking, for $15. You’re not supposed to leave your car overnight with Luxe, and if you do you’re charged $50.

ZIRX offers a $299 monthly fee, where you’ll get unlimited valet pick ups and drop offs. You could basically eliminate the hassle of street parking in your neighborhood or at work, if you can afford that price. Behr told me it’s like, “It’s kind of like your garage in the cloud.”

ZIRX parks its cars only in enclosed structures, complete with cameras.

All-in-all, it sounds like a more developed product. Luxe’s website makes it clear it doesn’t offer Android or overnight parking and it makes no mention of a monthly subscription service or enclosed parking structures. I reached out to Luxe one hour before publishing to inquire, and I’ll update this story when I hear back.

Update: After this story published, Luxe responded to my inquiry. The company says Android and overnight parking are both coming soon. Despite not being mentioned on the website, it does in fact have a monthly subscription for unlimited short-term valet requests — $99 for the first month, $299/month thereafter. Lastly, a Luxe spokesperson pointed out that the company has longer operating hours, staying open later than ZIRX most nights.

]]>On-demand parking app Luxe expands to Los Angeleshttp://gigaom.com/2014/11/17/on-demand-parking-app-luxe-expands-to-los-angeles/
Mon, 17 Nov 2014 18:32:45 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=889466One of the more luxurious on-demand companies out there, valet parking app Luxe, is moving into Los Angeles come December. That will be its second market, only a month and a half since launching its first publicly in San Francisco.

That’s a speedy expansion rate for an app with very complicated technical, data, and operational challenges to overcome. But Los Angeles, land of cars, is the perfect landing pad for it.

If you haven’t heard of Luxe, and you’re rolling your eyes at the thought of on-demand valet parking (I know I did), here’s the rundown. You order it off a mobile app when you leave home, and when you’re ten minutes away a Luxe driver traveling by foot or skateboard shows up at the specified intersection. They take the car, with a $1 million company insurance policy to cover any potential damages or theft, and drive it to one of the city’s many underutilized parking lots off the beaten path.

You pay $5 an hour for the privilege, with a max fee of $15, cheaper than most of the city’s parking lots. When you’re ready to pick your car up, the Luxe drivers bring it to wherever you are, even if it’s a different part of the city than where you dropped it off.

Drivers go through two weeks of training, learning how to operate different types of cars. There’s bound to be a few bumps along the way, but that’s par for the course with these new on-demand and marketplace startups — the best ones learn from their mistakes, develop systems to deal with such incidents, and introduce white gloved customer service to keep people happy.

The real question with Luxe isn’t whether it’s a good value for the consumer — at that price point it obviously is. Luxe’s challenge will be surviving on the revenue it generates. All day parking, with the cost of employing drivers, for only $15 a car doesn’t seem sustainable. Like many on-demand startup founders, Luxe’s CEO Curtis Lee believes that at scale the company will be profitable.

It has a number of competitors, some of which charge far more (ValetAnywhere), and others of which charge about the same (Zirx). For these companies, there’s a lot of moving parts, which will make them fascinating to watch from a data science and operations perspective.

Luxe has hired engineers — including one of Lyft’s data scientists — to analyze city demand patterns. That way, the company can predict where it needs most of its valet drivers at what time of day and minimize their travel time to reach each vehicle.

Luxe also has one unexpected element on its side: Parking lot space. Although you might think all San Francisco lots are filled at all times, Lee claims there’s plenty of other lots that stay half full, losing their owners money. Luxe struck partnerships with these lots for highly discounted rates. Since the valet drivers can return cars to people wherever they are, the lots used don’t need to be in prime foot traffic areas.

Once upon a time, Uber marketed itself as the option for “baller” passengers who wanted to treat themselves. Now, largely thanks to Lyft, the on-demand economy prioritizes accessibility over luxury. That model — cheaper prices in exchange for more customers — allows these companies to scale. It also appeals to the “everyman” value of Silicon Valley, land of t-shirts and hoodies.

But with its dirt cheap price, Luxe has some major, potentially impossible hurdles to overcome in its first few years. The fact that it has already expanded to Los Angeles might bode well. Either the company is feeling comfortable enough with its process to move to the next cash-cow location…or it’s about to fall flat on its face by expanding too quickly.

]]>Here’s what local governments care about when it comes to connected citieshttp://gigaom.com/2014/10/21/heres-what-local-governments-care-about-when-it-comes-to-connected-cities/
Tue, 21 Oct 2014 21:20:25 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=882639Private businesses aren’t the only ones tapping into the opportunities of the connected world. Local governments have taken notice, too. From monitoring parking meter data to tracking a city’s microclimates, progressive urban areas are all about the new world of sensors.

But said technology comes with its share of challenges, and it’s only in recent years that cities have started to figure out the best way to implement the technology. “As an industry we underestimated the complexity of deployment: security, privacy, even the talent,” Maciej Kranz, a VP at Cisco, said at the Gigaom Structure Connect conference Tuesday. “But I think we, as an industry, have learned from these lessons.”

Now, cities have learned to focus their ambitions, specifically on parking and lighting for the most part. Those are huge sources of revenue for the former, and a major spending cost for the latter. Making the building of such infrastructure more efficient can have a huge return on investment for local governments.

For example, smart LED street lights can turn on only when a person or car is near, saving energy the rest of the time. Parking meters can be connected to send information on where the least used parking lots are, and where more parking is necessary to build to meet the demand (and make the city money).

For Vijay Sammeta, the CIO of the city of San Jose, the biggest opportunity of a connected city has to do with residents’ health. “City data provides good early indicators of what’s going on in your community,” Sammeta said. “It isn’t the end all be all but it’s a major player and contributor to health care initiatives.”

San Jose isn’t the only city examining sensors and healthcare. Chicago is developing an extensive program with hundreds of sensors around town. The sensors will track metrics in different locations, to see if there’s a correlation between factors like weather or pedestrian movements and increased rates of diabetes or asthma in residents. Charlie Catlett, a senior computer scientist at the University of Chicago, explained that that this network of sensors allows Chicago to “begin to learn from the city.”

Photo by Jakub Mosur

]]>ParkWhiz raises $10M as more VC cash flows to parking spot-booking startupshttp://gigaom.com/2014/07/21/parkwhiz-raises-10m-as-more-vc-cash-flows-to-parking-spot-booking-startups/
Tue, 22 Jul 2014 00:03:29 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=859325Chicago is always looking for its tech niche. The Windy City pioneered the web daily deal, and it’s become the center of online takeout and delivery ordering market thanks to the growth of GrubHub. But a couple of companies may be carving out a new tech niche in the city: Parking.

That follows on the heels of $4.5 million Series A round raised by newcomer SpotHero, which is building a clearing house for garage spots in several cities. Both companies picked up earlier rounds of funding roughly at the same time only 18 months ago from competing Chicago VCs. Other startups outside of Chicago like ParkMe and Parking Panda are also tackling the same market.

ParkWhiz now counts parking garages, lot owners and event venues in 125 markets among its partners, and it has booked parking spots via its website or mobile app for 1 million different people. The company said it plans to use the funds to treble its staff to 75 employees in the coming year and expand into new cities.

SpotHero is one of many companies in the parking reservation business, which lets drivers locate parking at their destinations and reserve spots, all from their smartphones. But SpotHero is trying to set itself apart by acting as a parking broker. Garages with a lot of empty spaces can offer up their excess inventory to SpotHero, which then cuts deals with individual drivers based on time and demand.

The company came out of Chicago’s Excelerate Labs (Now TechStars) and raised a $2.5 million seed round in 2012 led by Battery Ventures. Since then it’s expanded beyond Chicago and Milwaukee to New York City; Newark, N.J.; Boston; Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/06/11/smart-parking-startup-spothero-raises-4-5m-in-series-a-funding/feed/1Ford’s connected car won’t deliver a pizza, but it can order onehttp://gigaom.com/2014/01/07/fords-connected-car-wont-deliver-a-pizza-but-it-can-order-one/
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/07/fords-connected-car-wont-deliver-a-pizza-but-it-can-order-one/#commentsTue, 07 Jan 2014 17:06:48 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=789847Ford Motor Company(s f) announced a batch of five new apps for its connected car platform Sync at CES on Tuesday, and these aren’t your usual audio streaming apps. Sync AppLink-enabled car drivers will soon be able to order a Domino’s pizza, remotely let repairmen into their homes, reserve a parking space, and make music playlist selections based on their mood — whether their on a leisurely drive or in the throes of road rage.

Ford also announced it will hold its first ever developer’s conference this June in its hometown of Dearborn, Mich., in conjunction with its Further with Ford event. The conference may spur more app development for AppLink, which has been surprisingly slow over the last year. Ford has the largest catalog of infotainment apps in the auto industry with 60 apps to its credit, but after it launched its open development platform last year, I expected a flood of new software to make its way to Sync. So far we’ve seen only a handful of new apps such as Spotify.

There’s also some good news at CES for Sync car owners that don’t have access to AppLink. Ford said last week that it will begin retroactively upgrading older Sync models to support the AppLink connected infotainment software, which lets you link smartphones apps to the dash. Ford said about 3.4 million vehicles built since 2010 are eligible.

Here are the new apps debuting in AppLink in the coming weeks:

Domino’s Pizza — Wouldn’t it be great if this app could actually take your car out to the nearest Domino’s and pick up your pizza? For now you’ll have to be content with online ordering from the dashboard. The app lets you use Sync’s voice commands to access a saved Easy Order profile from your smartphone Domino’s app. It’s a neat and handy trick if you want to pick up a pie on your way home from work.

ADT Pulse — This app is particularly interesting because it bridges two of the biggest areas of the internet of things: the connected car and the connected home. The app uses simple voice commands to update drivers on their home’s security system, allowing them to activate or deactivate alarms, adjust lighting and temperature and even remotely unlock the front door while on the road.

ParkmobileandParkopedia — Both of these apps will search nearby parking garages (or garages at your eventual destination) for open spaces, show rates and in some cases allow you to reserve a spot with a credit card. Parking has been a pet project of Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford, who believes we could save enormous amounts of time and fuel if we weren’t driving around cities looking for a place to stick our cars (see my recent profile on Bill Ford and his tech vision for the automaker). Ford’s venture fund Fontinalis Partners has invested in Parkmobile.

Gracenote HABU — Gracenote’s mood-based playlist generation technology analyzes your music library and pumps out tunes based on pre-selected moods such as “aggressive,” “sensual,” and “funky”. With the AppLink integration, drivers can access those mood-lists through simple voice commands.

For instance, if you’re doing 80 on the highway and the top’s down, Gracenote could start playing Steppenwolf, or if the windshield wipers are on, indicating gloomy weather, perhaps Death Cab for Cutie is called for. And if you’re caught in wall-to-wall traffic, Gracenote might actually try to mitigate your time-bomb tendencies by playing something soothing. Can you say Kenny G?

Of course, this technology is still in development, but it will eventually make it into Ford cars along with a lot of other apps that not only interpret your voice commands but can actually read your car and your driving habits.

One of the first published articles I ever wrote was a gem called “Parking is a bitch” in my college magazine. Back in 1998 that was certainly the case, but 15 years later sensors, mobile connectivity and real-time data analysis is finally giving consumers the opportunity to find street parking while cruising city streets.

In this week’s podcast I interview Zia Yusuf, president and CEO of Streetline (see disclosure) which is connecting parking spaces for major U.S. cities. The resulting app tells people where their best chance of finding an open parking space is and helps cities set demand-based pricing. In Los Angeles, parking fees have actually gone down on average.

Before we get to parking, I chat with my colleague Kevin Tofel about building a connected chair that will share his presence with his IM software and the pitfalls of two new connected home hubs I installed over the weekend. We’re looking for ideas on the chair projects, so feel free to listen up and share your thoughts in the comments or via twitter.

Disclosure: Streetline is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2013/10/29/is-finding-parking-an-internet-thing-of-the-past-and-connected-seat-cushions/feed/1With the help of $2.5M, SpotHero aims to fill parking lotshttp://gigaom.com/2012/12/13/with-the-help-of-2-5m-spothero-aims-to-fill-parking-lots/
http://gigaom.com/2012/12/13/with-the-help-of-2-5m-spothero-aims-to-fill-parking-lots/#commentsThu, 13 Dec 2012 13:00:57 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=593947Chicago’s SpotHero, one of this year’s Excelerate Labs graduates, has raised $2.5 million in funding to help build its parking spot reservation business. The round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from 500 Startups, David Cohen’s Bullet Time, e.Ventures, OCA Ventures, New World Ventures, Lightbank, & Draper VC.

There are multitudes of parking spot locator and reservation apps, but SpotHero is trying to set itself apart from the pack by becoming a parking broker of sorts. As co-founder and COO Jeremy Smith explained at Excelerate’s demo day in August, SpotHero has built the back-end systems that not only allow lot owners to notify drivers of parking availability, but to tailor space reservation and parking pass offers based on inventory, demand and specific customers needs.

By using SpotHero’s platform, parking lot owners can sell discounted spot reservations for specific hours or days and even sell monthly passes through the startup’s website and consumer facing Android(s goog) and iOS(s aapl) apps. Lot owners can even bid against each other for a customer’s business, Smith said.

Parking in a big city like Chicago may seem like a scarce resource, but in reality during most hours lots are sitting half empty. Consequently national and regional parking lot companies have taken a shine to SpotHero’s e-commerce platform in hopes of filling up those empty spaces. The service has been available for less than a year, but the startup claims to have generated more than $2 million in revenue for parking companies, even though its available in just two cities, Chicago and Milwaukee.

SpotHero was the first of the Excelerate’s 2012 class to raise funds, announcing an investment from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups the week before demo day (SpotHero won’t be participating in 500 Startups’ accelerator program though, choosing instead to remain in Chicago). SpotHero plans to use its new funding to hire more developers and expand beyond the Midwest.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2012/12/13/with-the-help-of-2-5m-spothero-aims-to-fill-parking-lots/feed/1Nokia tries ‘you show me yours, I’ll show you mine’ for parking datahttp://gigaom.com/2012/09/20/nokia-tries-you-show-me-yours-ill-show-you-mine-for-parking-data/
http://gigaom.com/2012/09/20/nokia-tries-you-show-me-yours-ill-show-you-mine-for-parking-data/#commentsThu, 20 Sep 2012 18:06:17 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=564993The next time you’re driving endlessly around the block wondering if there’s a spot open a couple blocks over, consider how much you’d be willing to pay for that type of information. If the answer is “nothing,” you’re in luck — because a new system developed by the Nokia Research Center doesn’t want your money. It just wants a little bit of your time, effort and information.

Called TruCentive, and highlighted in a post on the New Scientist blog Thursday morning, the software works like a bartering system of sorts for information on open parking spots. The more information users share about open spaces, the more credits they get for information on parking spots when they’re in need. And the more valuable the data users share (e.g., crowded downtown areas are worth more than the ‘burbs), the more credits they receive.

The credit system is a particularly smart idea in a world where citizens don’t always get value in return for their troubles. The thinking behind TruCentive is to encourage use of the system by rewarding citizens’ efforts, as opposed to similar crowdsourced parking apps that rely on citizen participation but have neither a carrot nor a stick at their disposal, according to the New Scientist post. Active users can be assured they’re getting special treatment in return for the data they share, while parasitic users will have to contribute or keep getting lower-quality information.

As I’ve suggested before, actually rewarding users for desired behavior might also work in the realm of web apps, where companies such as Facebook (s fb) require more data to keep services free, but users don’t want to sacrifice their privacy. Even if data exchange is a largely a one-way street, there has to be a quid pro quo in there somewhere.

A screenshot of Xerox parking software.

To me, however, the greatest aspect of a system like TruCentive might be its marriage, if possible, to other parking projects such as Xerox’s ExpressPark(s xrx). Although the parking revolution is just getting underway, the (hopefully) forthcoming combination of smart parking meters, crowdsourced data on other spots and predictive models should save commuters time, clear congestion and generally improve everyone’s lives. Maybe even pedestrians can reap the rewards — the more confident drivers are there’ll be a spot waiting for them in a particular location, the less they have to stare at a device searching for one.